The Druids of the Flame… /sigh. Okay, flaming kitty form is cool, it’s very pretty, I’ll grant you that. It brings out my inner druidic aesthete, I’ll be getting my face clawed, screaming in excruciating pain, but all the while I’ll be thinking, “Darling, those flames look simply FABulous on you! What octane do you drink to get that gorgeous orange tone?”

And they’ve got this blazing phoenix flight form too, it makes me swoon with desire. Have you seen them flying around in that form, leaving blazing contrails across the sky?

I was okay with it. It’s pretty cool, seeing Druids from an entirely new visual perspective.

But then I was fighting some, and they went and unloaded on me in Scorpion form.

Scorpion form!

I’ve got a great sleek black kitty form, and I love my bear form, but I had to check out my horny feather form for a second, sure I missed something. Nope, same old Moonkin form we’ve had for years. I look back over to the new, improved Druid forms for the 2011 model year… the NPC druids get WHAT FRABJOUS IDIOT DECIDED TO DO THAT?

Scorpion form? Really? If you stab me in my furry heart, do I not bleed, Blizzard? DO I NOT BLEED?!?

I’ll be blunt. Blizz, don’t you EVER tell me again that you don’t want to waste spending development time and money on new Druid form graphics because too few members of the player population would benefit. If you can whip up an entire new gorgeous range of druid forms for a content patch, you can bloody well update the Moonkin form that you expect people, actual paying customers, to continue to play for the next five years. /endrant.

Grrr.

Moving on, away from certain… issues… the author may have, and returning to flaming spiders.

Tholo, when approached in the Shadow Warden area, will sometimes offer you a quest called The Flame Spider Queen.

Yeah, I know, it feels like I’m taking forever to get to the point.

Here’s the deal. This Flame Spider Queen quest sends you out to gather up two different kinds of spider… fluids.

You’ve got to collect Flame Venom, which the normal flaming melee spiders have when you kill them. They’re in range, they wander around all over the area, you have to kill them anyway for another quest. No worries.

The other spider…. fluid you have to collect is Searing Web Fluid.

The Searing Web Fluid comes from Cinderweb Spinners… who live on The Hill.

The Cinderweb Spinners, when you do something to get their attention, will… spray… you with their noxious juices, and then yank you up to them on their high stone perch!

When you get sprayed in the face in this fashion, you collect one of the 8 Searing Web Fluid that you need. You can then proceed to kill the spider, and you’re standing up there, on a higher stone perch of The Hill.

The idea is for you to continue to annoy the Cinderweb Spinners, getting sprayed by spider juices and then getting yanked up to progressively higher perches, until, finally, you are on top of and King of the Spider-Hill! Way to go! Grats!

Hey, I can see my house from here. Hey! You! Get the hell off my lawn!

But what if you come back the next day, get the same quest, and really don’t feel like killing 8 individual Cinderweb Spinners? They can be a pain in the butt to target, since they sit up on these high stone ledges, and you can’t get good line of sight up there. Some classes don’t have 40 yard ranged tugs, either.

Yeah, I said ‘tug’ instead of ‘pull’.

Here’s why.

What you do is, you approach your Cinderweb Spinner of choice, for the purposes of this demonstration we’ll name him “John”. He’s your john of the evening. Take a moment to get to know each other.

Hi john!

You ‘tug’ on the john, and he’ll spray you with his juices, and then drag you up there to his high perch.

But you don’t have to kill him to collect the fluid, it’s sprayed all over your face. Kill john? Let’s not be too hasty, here!

All you need is a rag to wipe it off with, and then take a step back off the ledge… and he’ll spray you again, dragging you right back up there.

Every time the john sprays you in the face, you get another Searing Web Fluid to pack away in your, umm, bags.

So you can tug on that spider repeatedly, and he’ll just keep spraying you in the face until you’ve got all 8 of the Searing Web Fluid that you need.

Now, sure, once you’ve got what you, err, came for, you can kill john if you want. But after all that you’ve been through together, you know he’s tired and just wants to roll over and go to sleep, so why not jump down off the hill and run like hell, see if you can break aggro before his next 2 second spray cast gets, err, ‘off’ on you.

As I said when we started this journey together…

If you have the right mental attitude, you can find a world of fun in just about anything.

Every time I Battle Rez someone with my druid and call out over vent “I’m Getting [player] up” I think of “Im up…they see me…I’m Down. Reminds me of the stupid stuff at MCT and how boot we are going through there 🙂